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What is an Employee Experience Platform?

Nearly every business owner can agree that maintaining a diverse and ever-growing workforce is no small feat. The countless obstacles that business owners and their staff face daily can feel like you’re climbing a mountain that you will never summit. 

One area of employment that is particularly difficult and costly to deal with is benefits. According to Statista, the combined healthcare cost between employers and employees on average is $13,000 per year. 

What if there was a tool to help reduce employee healthcare costs while simultaneously increasing employee engagement, employee retention, and employee wellbeing & satisfaction all at once?

This is where an innovative solution like an employee experience platform comes into play. In this blog article, we’ll be answering some of the most pressing questions everyone is asking: “what is an employee experience platform?”, “why is an employee experience platform important?”, and “how can an employee experience platform benefit my company?”. So grab your pen and notebook or tablet and get ready to take notes because we’re about to dive in!

What is an Employee Experience Platform?

To put it plainly, an employee experience platform (EXP) is a company-wide software solution that can be deployed on your employees’ favorite devices and is designed to tackle challenging issues like employee communication, benefit education, and engagement within your company. 

Its main function is to help support your employees in making better and more cost-effective healthcare choices, gain insights and tips to improve their physical and mental wellness, and also encourage both professional and personal growth.

An employee experience platform integrates many of your pre-existing HR processes and employee interactions into a unified, user-friendly digital environment. It’s aimed at improving employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention by fostering a more engaging and supportive workplace environment.

How can an Employee Experience Platform Benefit My Company?

Great question, we’re glad you asked! An employee experience platform can benefit any company in many ways. A few of these benefits include:

Employee Benefits Education

One of the main advantages that an employee experience platform offers is the ability to educate your workforce on utilizing their benefits effectively. This benefits education, when appropriately applied, reduces their overall healthcare cost dramatically. 

This can prove advantageous to employers by improving your overall workforce satisfaction. A workforce that is educated on how to use their benefits more effectively can increase the amount of money they have each year without increasing the amount of money you pay them. Let us explain.

If your employee requires immediate medical attention, they may feel that they have no other option than to seek medical care via an emergency room. This can be a costly choice as the average US emergency room visit can cost anywhere between $200-$10,000.

Alternatively, an employee who is armed with the right knowledge could see a medical professional at an urgent care clinic for a fraction of that cost. Urgent care visits in the United States average between $75-$200, dramatically less expensive than rushing into an emergency room. Though often overlooked, urgent care facilities can be effective & provide a better value solution for broken bones, lacerations that require stitches, and many other non-life-threatening situations.

This difference in knowledge is only one of the many ways that an employee could profit from gaining an education on how to use their benefits effectively, and we haven’t even talked about the potential savings regarding pharmacy medication, cancer treatment, dietary, and exercise education.

The overall goal here is to increase the value of your employees benefits package. Benefits are an expensive, but worthwhile investment to increase the health and satisfaction of your employees. By increasing benefits education, you are consequently Increasing the utility of employee benefits, which then allows the value of their benefits to be increased. Benefits education is a win for everyone!

Employee Engagement

There are many unique ways to increase employee engagement, including great ideas like employee recognition, employee rewards, internal TED-style talks, and employee-driven charity initiatives. One of the most effective employee engagement methods is through wellness challenges, which can be performed effortlessly through a well-constructed and gamified employee experience platform.

Wellness challenges are a great way to offer fun and healthy competition between employees. These challenges can be performed either at the individual level, in teams, or between company departments.

There are many different challenges that your company can provide too. They can revolve around accumulating a certain number of steps per day, reaching a goal of active minutes, and drinking a certain number of ounces of water to complete a challenge.

Your company can’t go wrong no matter which challenge you choose! Engaging your employees and building camaraderie through an employee experience platform could be just the thing your business needs to elevate your employees’ experience.

Employee Communication

Another benefit that employee experience platforms offer to companies is a convenient method to communicate important messages and updates to employees company-wide. This can be done with ease as the EXP software can be downloaded to the cellphones that your people already have through many of the popular app stores.

This is a powerful benefit for a growing organization in the modern era as it will allow you to increase communication with those who are working from home (WFH) or abroad. While working from remotely has many benefits, one disadvantage that WFH employees may feel is a sense of loneliness. A robust employee experience platform can help alleviate feelings of isolation by providing a tool to connect employees with their fellow peers outside of the office.

You could use an EXP to post announcements on your employee experience platform’s message board about changes within your company. Some examples of these changes could be in healthcare plans, announcements of a new wellness challenge, or even invite everyone to a company-wide luncheon.

You can even think about it as an internal, company-wide social media feed! Anything that you feel your entire company could benefit from being aware of can be posted in a fun and exciting way through your message board.

Can an Employee Experience Platform Streamline My Company’s HR Processes?

An employee experience platform is designed to make it easier for your HR department to do its job more effectively. By providing a centralized location for many of your company’s most important functions, your HR team doesn’t have to scrounge through a myriad of different tools just to do their job.

Through an EXP, Employees gain the ability to self-serve information from many of the vital resources. This centralized hub of information grants your employees the tools they need to perform at their absolute best. It may seem obvious, but the positive benefits that an employee experience platform can provide by consolidating company information into a single location, including all professional and personal growth opportunities, can prove to be immediately beneficial.

Employee experience platforms also offer a way for you to pulse-check your employees’ workplace satisfaction by offering surveys and digital suggestion boxes. This can help your employees feel heard, their issues seen, and ensure their work has a deeper intrinsic meaning. These changes can improve both overall satisfaction and productivity for your company.

Employee experience platforms provide much-needed relief for your hard-working human resources department. No more tying up overworked HR staff to perform repetitive searches deep within a recessed intranet archive to find basic information that your people are constantly looking for.

How can an Employee Experience Platform Impact My Business Outcomes?

Beyond the benefits that we’ve already covered, employee experience platforms offer much more to the pioneering companies that adopt them. This includes:

Increased Employee ROI

According to a report by The Conference Board, disengaged employees cost American businesses up to $550 billion per year (yes, billion). While it may seem initially counter-intuitive to spend more money on your employees to save money, providing your employees the means to empower themselves may save you from being a part of that terrifying statistic up above.

You’ll also be able to gain data-driven insights into how you can improve your company through the use of an employee experience platform. If you’re a data nerd like us, you might be interested in learning about our ultimate list of employee engagement metrics so you know what to look out for.

Improved Company Culture

Culture can also be bolstered through the deployment of an employee experience platform. By engaging more with your employees, reducing their healthcare costs through benefit education, and increasing company communication your employees are primed to think more fondly of the company they work for.

It’s also simpler to align your company’s employees with company goals and values more easily through the use of an employee experience platform. EXPs help employees understand the underlying narrative of why your vision is important, to which they are more likely to work effectively towards the same goals.

Attracting and Retaining Top Talent

Not only are employers more likely to enjoy working for your company, but they’re also more likely to stay at your company, as well as tell others that your company is a delight to be a part of. This can be a fantastic tool to reduce turnover while simultaneously broadening your candidate pool when hiring for new positions.

Final Thoughts on What Is An Employee Experience Platform?

Whether you’re looking to improve your workplace’s productivity, make your employees happier, or reduce your team’s healthcare costs, an employee experience platform may be right for you.

The typical employee experience platform costs a fraction of what the average American company pays on employee benefits. It pays to invest in technology to better arm your employees with the knowledge they need to utilize those benefits as effectively as possible. This knowledge can not only dramatically increase the rate of return on those benefits, but also substantially increase the quality of life of your employees as well.

If you enjoyed what you read today and are interested in learning more about implementing an employee experience platform, Motion Connected can help. We offer a robust and fully featured employee experience platform for companies who are looking to take their employees’ engagement to a new level.

Contact our employee experience specialists today to book a free demo of our product and see how we can help you get the most out of your employees’ benefits.